NVIDIA to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9 Billion

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and YOKNEAM, Israel, March 11, 2019 -- NVIDIA and Mellanox today announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion. Once complete, the combination is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow.

The acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.

The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore’s law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox’s intelligent networking solutions.

Datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance.

An early innovator in high-performance interconnect technology, Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine.

“We’re excited to unite NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s world-renowned accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacenter-scale computing solutions. I am particularly thrilled to work closely with the visionary leaders of Mellanox and their amazing people to invent the computers of tomorrow.”

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”

The companies have a long history of collaboration and joint innovation, reflected in their recent contributions in building the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Many of the world’s top cloud service providers also use both NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. NVIDIA and Mellanox share a common performance-centric culture that will enable seamless integration.

Once the combination is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in local excellence and talent in Israel, one of the world’s most important technology centers. Customer sales and support will not change as a result of this transaction.

Additional Transaction Details

Post close, the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA’s non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow. NVIDIA intends to fund the acquisition through cash on its balance sheet. In addition, there is no change to its previously announced capital return program for the rest of fiscal 2020. The transaction has been approved by both companies’ boards of directors and is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019, subject to regulatory approvals as well as other customary closing conditions, including the approval by Mellanox shareholders of the merger agreement.

Advisors

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to NVIDIA and Jones Day served as legal advisor. Credit Suisse Group and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. served as financial advisors to Mellanox and Latham & Watkins, LLP and Herzog Fox & Neeman served as legal advisors.

Conference Call and Webcast Details

NVIDIA will conduct a webcast at 5:30 a.m. PT today to discuss the transaction. The webcast and a copy of the presentation materials can be found on NVIDIA’s Investor Relations website at investor.nvidia.com. A webcast replay and a copy of the webcast presentation materials will also be available at investor.nvidia.com.

About Mellanox

Mellanox is a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase datacenter efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise datacenters, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services. More information is available at http://www.mellanox.com/.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. More information at http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/.